Combining Indicators of Allophony

Luc Boruta
Univ. Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, ALPAGE, UMR-I 001 INRIA, F-75205, Paris, France & LSCP, Département d'Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, F-75005, Paris, France


Abstract

Allophonic rules are responsible for the great variety in phoneme realizations. Infants can not reliably infer abstract word representations without knowledge of their native allophonic grammar. We explore the hypothesis that some properties of infants' input, referred to as indicators, are correlated with allophony. First, we provide an extensive evaluation of individual indicators that rely on distributional or lexical information. Then, we present a first evaluation of the combination of indicators of different types, considering both logical and numerical combinations schemes. Though distributional and lexical indicators are not redundant, straightforward combinations do not outperform individual indicators.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/.pdf